Transmissions of Intelligence
Fom the book to the internet, the way we communicate
shapes the kind of society in which we live, argues McKenzie
Wark.
THE VICTORIAN INTERNET:
The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth
Century's Online Pioneers
Tom Standage
Weidenfeld and Nicholson
$35.00 hb 216pp
AVATARS OF THE WORD:
>From Papyrus to Cyberspace
James J. O'Donnell
Harvard University Press
$57.00 hb 210pp
THE RELIGION OF TECHNOLOGY:
The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention
David Noble
Alfred Knopf
$59.00 hb 273pp
Samuel Morse, who gives his name to 'Morse code', was an
unlikely figure to end up famous. Remembered as the father
of what was probably the greatest communication revolution
of all of recorded human history, Morse started out as a
society portrait painter and an enthusiast for get rich quick
schemes. he was also an amateur inventor. One of his many
schemes involved a marble cutting machine that would
make copies of famous statues for the masses. This was
typical of Morse's imagination: he liked to think of ways of
getting the good life to people to a bargain price.
The revelation that led Morse to invest so much of his life in
the telegraph happened on board ship, returning from
Europe to America in 1832. He was on his way home with a
giant canvas, six by nine feet, on which he was painting 38 of
the Louvre's greatest works. He had a notion to exhibit it and
charge admission. What distracted him from finishing it was
a demonstration of the potentials of a new invention --
electrical telegraphy.
Quite a few people had dabbled in the business of trying to get
an electrical pulse to travel down a wire in such a way as to
convey a message from one place to another, but nobody had
quite made it work. There were problems with producing a
reliable electrical current, getting the current to carry over a
long wire, and of deciding on how to make the current carry
elaborate messages. But Morse was an optimist by nature. On
seeing the shipboard demonstration, he is supposed to have
said: "I see no reason why intelligence might not be
instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance."
It's a curious choice of words: the transmission of
intelligence. It crops up twice in Tom Standage's very
readable potted history of telegraphy, The Victorian Internet.
As Standage reports, the telegraph met with much scepticism
at first. Few people had Morse's imagination. Few people
realised just what a revolution it would start. But once it got
going, it really took off. In 1846 there was just 40 miles of
telegraph line in the United States, running from
Washington to Baltimore. By 1848 there was 2 000 miles, and
by 1850, 12 000 miles. One the technical problems of
designing, installing and maintaining underwater cables was
solved, by among others, Lord Kelvin, the telegraph grew
even faster. By the 1870s, there were 650,000 miles of wire.
There were 20,000 towns that were, as Standage puts it,
'online'. Australia went online in 1871.
It's a peculiar feature of the economy of networks that each
additional unit of connection added actually increases the
value of all the others. Washington to Baltimore is not much
use to anyone, even in Washington or Baltimore. But when
people can connect Washington to 20 000 other places -- you
have a communication revolution.
This business of the transmission of intelligence is the key. In
biology, the evolution of specialised nerve cells meant that
organisms could be any shape at all, and the extremities could
still be in communication. Likewise, with the telegraph, the
shape of human organisation was now free to follow any
form. It was no longer necessary for people who
communicate with each other a lot to be in proximity. It was
no longer the case that the further away people were away
from each other the less immediate power they had to
influence each other's lives.
Telegraphy was essential to the running of the British
empire. After the telegraph, colonial governors were
immediately answerable to London. So too where generals in
the field, who since the Crimean war have often been
plagued by officials back home second guessing their every
move. Telegraphy transformed the newspaper business and
led to the invention of modern conventions of 'reporting'.
Many newspapers around the world are still named the
Telegraph. Telegraphy made modern big business and big
government organisations possible, with regional or branch
plants subordinated to head office.
Perhaps most important, when combined with the railways,
telegraphy led to what we now know as the 'economy'. As
Standage so succinctly puts it: "Suddenly, the price of goods
and the speed with which they could be delivered became
more important than their geographical location."
Information about what buyer want, what goods sellers have,
and what price both are prepared to bid could now be
available across whole countries, even across the world.
What is often called 'globalisation' is really just the logical
extension of this process of the instantaneous transmitting
intelligence that began with the telegraph. Since the
telegraph, information can move faster than people or
things. As a consequence, political, military, diplomatic,
economic and cultural power depends upon the timely
transmission of intelligence.
It is appropriate that Standage calls his book The Victorian
Internet. It's been fashionable in the 90s to think of the
communication revolution of our time as the only one that
matters. Actually, the internet, multimedia, hypertext -- the
whole cyberhype lexicon, is really more a bunch of
evolutionary steps than a big revolutionary one. If there is a
significant breakthrough, I think it was the telegraph, which
for the first time enabled information to move more quickly
than anything else, thus shifting the balance of power to
those with access to rapid communication. The internet is
just telegraphy with pictures.
Ironically, most of the almost theological belief in the
transforming power of the internet was once attached to
telegraphy. Indeed, for a long time now, in Western cultures
at least, technologies of all kinds have been viewed in a
strangely spiritual way. The historian David Noble has
tracked this convergence of religion and technology back into
the middle ages in his book The Religion of Technology.
Noting that many of the great American engineer inventors,
including Morse and Edison, were often also deeply religious
or spiritual, he proposes a whole framework for seeing the
west as a culture steeped in the ideology of redemption
through technology.
Technology and enlightenment are supposed to be at odds
with religion and faith, but Noble thinks otherwise. Since the
middle ages, he argues, the practical and useful arts, which in
the classical world the educated treated as beneath them,
became instead the object of serious intellectual
consideration. "Technology came to be identified with
transcendence." The most lowly became a route to the most
exhalted.
A good Christian in the early middle ages would be one who
tried to imitate the life of Christ, or what was much the same
thing, the life of Adam. Before the fall, Adam dwelt in a
world of perfect knowledge and in harmony with God and
nature. After the fall, mere mortal men live in ignorance of
divine and perfect knowledge, and rely on the contrivances
and artifices of the useful arts to get by.
The change that Noble identifies is in the attitude to these
useful arts. The new view was that practical knowledge
might represent fragments of the lost divine and perfect
knowledge. Preparing for Christ's return might not be a
matter of just a spiritual preparation. It might also require the
recovery, bit by bit, of the lost knowledge of Adam, so that the
perfect kingdom could be prepared for Christ's return.
The Benedictines were early advocates of this spiritualised
attention to the practical. Noble credits them with a
"medieval industrial revolution" in the use of windmill,
watermills and agricultural technology. Johns Scotus Erigena
provided the theological justification. Man is made in God's
image, but this was usually taken to mean that only the soul
is like God, but the physical and material aspect of human
existence is something extraneous. Erigena argued that the
physical aspect of man's being also partakes of the divine. As
a consequence, the state of that physical being, its care and
maintenance, and the technologies that sustain it, all have a
spiritual significance.
The monks began to pay serious attention to improving this
life, here on earth. Writes Noble: "The recovery of
mankind's divine likeness, the transcendent trajectory of
Christianity, thus now became at the same time an
immanent historical project. As a result, the pursuit of
renewed perfection -- through myriad means which now
included the advancement of the arts -- gained coherence,
confidence, a sense of mission, and momentum."
Through many hundreds of years, Noble traces the lineage of
the men of the book who espoused and refined this view of
the world. "In the view of this emerging elite, the
millennium had already begun that they were the earthly
saints." The Franciscans were even more evangelical about
the advancement of knowledge and technology than the
Benedictines. They were keen on technology as an
anticipation and approximation of the restoration of Adamic
perfection. They were also interested in navigation and
exploration -- only when everyone has been converted will
Christ return. Noble makes a lot out of Christopher
Columbus' attachment to the Franciscans.
A marvellous quote from Paracelsus sums up the ideological
principle Noble finds at work throughout: "When the end of
the world draws near, all things will be revealed. From the
lowest to the highest, from the first to the last -- what each
thing is, and why it existed and passed away, from what
causes, and what its meaning was. And everything that is in
the world will be disclosed and come to light." Anyone who
has been exposed to the cyberhype about the world wide web
is likely to find this strangely familiar. The current crop of
communication technologies are often promoted as the
means to achieve a secularised version of the same vision:
the virtual library in which all information is perfectly
ordered for instant recall.
The English Protestants of the 17th century believed they
were living near the end of the world, and given the
religious sectarian violence of Europe they had good reason.
The Puritan heightening of millenarian faith was intimately
connected to the early beginnings of English empirical
science. Francis Bacon, in particular, embodies this seemingly
paradoxical combination of the spiritual and the practical.
Noble draws special attention to the "the exaggerated
anthropocentric assumptions of his 17th century Protestant
faith." Before the fall, Adam was a mortal God, made of His
likeness. The developing knowledge elite saw itself as
embodying a bit of that lost divine perfection to the extent
that it had recovered part of the universal knowledge from
before the fall. They imagined Paradise as a place in which
man, like God, was in command of nature.
Things change a bit in the 18th century. "Attempting to know
the mind of God by scientifically deciphering the divine
design behind nature, which now came to be viewed as a
God-crafted mechanism, entailed a greater identification with
God than did a mere recovery of Adam's divine-likeness." In
conventional narratives about the rise of science, the names
of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and
Charles Babbage frequently stand for a gradual freeing of
science from the mysticism of religion. Noble argues, to the
contrary, that the ideology of technology as transcendence
was what motivated their scientific experiments and theories.
It was a way to get closer to the perfect knowledge of Adam
before the fall. Even more boldly, it became a way to
comprehend the mind of God Himself.
The thread of Noble narrative takes us from Protestant
England to the new world. "It was successive generations of
millenarian Protestants who gave America its defining myth,
rooted in the providential promise of new beginnings." The
telegraph entered American culture not just as a worldly
device but also as a divine one, ordained for spreading the
Christian message. The first message sent by telegraph was, as
Noble reminds us, "what hath God wrought!" Samuel Morse
himself came from a very devout family.
Reading The Religion of Technology, one gets the sense of
wave after wave of facts mobilised to prove again and again
one single idea. It's a bold idea, and one that provides a
useful context for the millennial ambitions of cyberhype. In
tracing the connection between advanced European theology,
Protestant knowledge in England and its migration to the
new world, Noble furnishes a reason for the concentration of
millennial and transcendent themes in American writing
about the internet and the information revolution. It is in
California that Marshall McLuhan, the great prophet of the
media as the sacred way back to the Edenic "global village",
has enjoyed the strongest revival in the 90s.
All the same, there are problems with Noble's history of this
"ideology" of transcendence through technology. He has not
really thought about the technologies that enabled this self-
appointed elect to perpetuate these ideas or impress them on
the minds of others. For all the breadth of his interest in
technology, Noble stops short of examining the role of
communication technology. His is a world in which ideology
passes from one great mind to another, with the odd
mention of institutions that brought them together.
Perhaps it is because of his rather odd job that James J.
O'Donnell avoids this conceptual mistake. O'Donnell is both
Professor of Classical Studies and also Vice Provost for
Information Systems at the University of Pennsylvania. Out
of this dual experience he has extracted a quirky and
enlightening set of essays, Avatars of the Word.
O'Donnell's patch is late Roman antiquity, and he starts with
some thumbnail sketches of the great men of letters at work.
Then he pops up with a most unlikely proposition: "Erasmus
and Jerome were their own first image managers." Jerome
created an image of himself as a man of intellectual authority
through a "self-adverting correspondence with the leading
minds of his day. Erasmus, who edited Jerome's letters and
wrote the first biography of him based on documents rather
than myths, shaped not only his own reputation as a man
steeped in written authority, but some of our still-current
ideas about how write or read a biography, and how to edit
someone's letters.
In short, the kind of great men Noble chronicles as men of
big ideas were also inventors of the means of exercising their
intellectual power. They used the leading communication
technologies of the day for the transmission of intelligence.
They figured out how to influence the course of events and
the thoughts of others through the transmission of
intelligence. The means at their disposal were at lot slower
than the telegraph, but were nevertheless very effective.
The combination of classical historian and academic manager
of information technology seems to give O'Donnell a
singularly clear view of the often mystified way scholars have
of seeing themselves in a 'tradition'. Great ideas don't just
float from mind to mind because of their inherent brilliance.
They have to be communicated. O'Donnell is aware of the
whiff of heresy about this. "Critical scholarship runs into a
hail of rhetorical bullets when it tries to adjust the idealised
past to conform to the actual surviving evidence." We're still
reluctant to look behind the great men, the great books and
the great discoveries and inventions to see how the
transmission of intelligence actually works as a form of
power.
A famous anecdote about Machiavelli's private life has him
donning a ceremonial robe before entering his study,
wherein he could confer with the great Pagan sages.
O'Donnell's reading is an illuminating one. Machiavelli was
writing at a time when the 'writer' was yet to be invented. He
was a man used to the discourse of speech, a public act,
conducted with some ceremony. So he created a little ritual
for himself so that the act of writing would seem less strange.
It's not an example O'Donnell uses, but I think the contrary
portrait, of a writer at home with the very strange business of
sitting alone in a study, writing to unknown other people
who may not even have been born yet, is Montaigne. His is a
much more intimate and equal mode of address. To him a
reader is a friend, not a prince to be persuaded or a pupil to be
instructed.
It's no use studying something as ethereal as 'ideology'
without looking at the very concrete means by which ideas
have force in the world. Those means change over time. It's a
different thing being Jerome, trying to use the hand-written
letter that is hand delivered as a means of exerting influence,
to being General Kitchener, using the telegraph to
communicate with London from the Sudan about whether to
make war or peace with a rival army. Noble gets an
interesting take on half the story -- the source of the desire for
technological advancement. But he doesn't follow the other
half of the story -- the feedback loop by which available
technologies shape the potential for the transmission of
intelligence.
O'Donnell notes that the power of Christianity was always in
part dependent on its powers of communication. "Control
over texts had brought control over people." Here we come
close to an answer to the question Noble can neither ask nor
answer: why was it that the ideology of technology as
transcendence became an effective one in western history?
Because of the power over the transmission of intelligence of
the church itself.
Particular kinds of communication technology might lend
themselves to being put together in different sorts of ways.
You can make quite different kinds of church, and quite
different kinds of power, out of different means of
transmitting intelligence. Centralising access and authority to
interpret the Bible, as the Catholic church once did, produces
a hierarchical organisation able to use its textual authority to
maintain a degree of uniformity across space. Propagating
and distributing the Bible, as the Protestants preferred,
produces a more democratic, but also more differentiated and
splintered culture.
O'Donnell has some interesting insights into the way the
technology for writing could be used to create a centralised
and hierarchical kind of power. The quote Noble cites from
Paracelsus sums up this desire -- for a world perfectly ordered
from top to bottom and first to last. O'Donnell is a bit
reductive about it, however. Writing, he writes: "makes the
life of a community depend neither on spontaneous choice
nor on the orally assimilated customs and wisdom of the past
nor again on a charismatic leader, but rather on specific rules
and regulations written down on the page." This may have
been the case with the kinds of power the church once
assembled out of writing, but as O'Donnell's own book
attests, writing can be used in many different ways -- his own
writing being an exemplar of the sceptical and democratic
spirit in essay writing, writing as a discussion among friends,
that was pioneered by Montaigne.
The same is true of the telegraph. Standage gives examples of
the use of the telegraph to coordinate the efforts of centralised
powers over vast spaces, but he also gives some examples of
quite the contrary kinds of uses. The criminal use of
telegraphy to defraud bookies, the romantic use of it to
subvert patriarchal authority, and the subversive uses of
spies and revolutionaries might point to a more complex
understanding of the relationship between communication
and power.
Even forms of scholarly power and authority are at stake in
the uses that are made of communication, and the myths
perpetuated about knowledge. One must be particularly
careful when citing the great men and their illustrious
names. O'Donnell is sceptical about the idea of the great
chain of tradition, and as a scholar of late classical antiquity
he is well placed to debunk the mythology of the canon.
"Where late antiquity had seen disruption and the creation of
a new tradition, early modernity... instead turned remarkably
conservative in the face of the possibility of chaos. The
deliberate emphasis on and systematic reacquisition of Greek
and Latin classical literature created the illusion of a
tradition."
The authoritarian use of the transmission of intelligence is to
insist on a central and sacred canon of authoritative
knowledge that only the scholar, like the theologian
beforehand, has access to. A more democratic view might
stress, as O'Donnell does, the gaps and breaks, the
improvisations, the extent to which culture always invents
its own tradition. Tradition is a communication of
intelligence in which in reality the present communicates to
the future its ideal version of the past.
At the end of the day, O'Donnell wants to undo the one-sided
emphasis on writing and the archive as the sole font of all
wisdom. Here he touches on a problem that surely has
become ever more pressing since the telegraph first
accelerated the velocity at which intelligence can be
transmitted. There was always more than one way of
transmitting intelligence, and the way it is transmitted may
effect the way it is received. There may be a difference not just
between authoritarian and democratic ideologies, but also in
the means of communicating them. Indeed, contrary to
Noble, the means of transmission, which he largely ignores,
may have more impact than the ideas themselves.
As O'Donnell remarks, "The notion that reality itself can be
reduced to a single model universally shared is at best a
useful fiction, at worst a hallucination that will turn out to
have been dependent on the written word for its ubiquity and
power." In not investigating the history of writing as a key
technology, and his own practice of writing history as
dependent on that technology, Noble has missed the point.
Thinking about the means of communication seems
particularly pressing in the 90s. This may not be the moment
of a great transcendent revolution in communication, as the
cyberhype of California's information technology moguls
would have it. But it is a time when there might be a lot
more choices than usual about what kind of communication
technology we can have. The serious debate that needs to be
had about this is really fundamentally about what kind of
people we want our children, and their children, to become.
Far more important than what great books they read may be
the choice as to whether they have the capacity to live and
love and work with a democratic or an authoritarian
network of communication, in which they choose for
themselves what counts as significant transmissions of
intelligence.
***
McKenzie Wark is the author of three books, most recently
Celebrity, Culture and Cyberspace (Pluto Press, 1998). In
collaboration with Brad Miller, he produced the multimedia
work Planet of Noise (Australian Film Commission, 1997)
http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark
__________________________________________
"We no longer have roots, we have aerials."
http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark
-- McKenzie Wark
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